Boise Student Among Few To Ace Advanced Placement Test

A Boise student was one of only a dozen in the world to get a perfect score on last year’s Advanced Placement micro-economics exam. More than 62,000 students took that test last spring. Then Boise High senior Sam Faucher was one of them.

Faucher will soon start his second semester at Yale University. He says he can’t remember much about the test he aced except that he had to draw a lot of graphs. He says he thought he did well but later had some doubts.

“I remember talking with friends about this moment or that and whether this graph touched above some line or below some line. And you kind of get swept up by little worries about a single point or a single couple of points,” he says. “But on the whole, yeah, I’d known going into the test and after the test that I’d been prepared pretty well, and that I’d most likely be fine.”

Faucher says he feels lucky to have attended Boise High which emphasizes the AP program. High school students who score well on AP tests can earn college credit.

Faucher hasn’t declared a major yet but he’s thinking about environmental engineering and economics. He says among his Yale classmates, past academic achievements, like his perfect AP score, don’t count for much. Activities he says are more important. Faucher also earned a spot playing cello in Yale’s orchestra.